A few days ago I created a mail address that never worked… funny thing is that DH mail servers accepted mail for it, but messages never got delivered.

I submitted a support ticket for this at 11:23AM PDT on June 21st (tkt #1936689).

About 15 minutes after that I got a reply telling me that some script got “lazy” about updating my account data, but that it was restarted and that everthing should be working in 30/60minutes… the support guy (Jason) also told me that incoming messages probably got lost in the meantime… I told him it wasn’t a problem since the address wasn’t yet public. He told me that if I still had problems after an hour, that I replied telling it so. This was at 12:28PM that same day and is the last time I got any communication from DH.

2 hours later (2:35PM, June 21), the address was still non-functional, so I replied again and told it so.

I bumped again at 6:48AM and 11:42AM, June 22. No answer. Neither a small “we’re working on it”, or “try erasing the account and re-creating”, nothing, just plain silence.

I posted a new incident (tkt #1938888) at 4:43PM June 22 about the same mail account that never got replied.

It is now about 5:00AM PDT June 23rd… almost 42 hours past the original ticket posting. More than 40 hours since tha last time I heard something from DH.

What am I to do?

Should I keep waiting? For how long?

Should I raise yet another ticket? Will this be promptly served? Why the previous didn’t?

I now $8/mo is “cheap”, but it is NOT free, and if not the TOS, at least the rules of curtesy allow me to get some reply from customer support after 40 hours.

Their policy is a 48-hour turn-around for support tickets. Filing tons and tons of tickets, one after another, will only work to annoy support and probably get you ignored for an even longer duration. Try being patient sometime

That said - it’s highly unusual for support not to get back to someone within 24-hours… so I can’t imagine what their problem is other than your continued “spamming” of the support system. But I’d continue to harass them at this point if they haven’t replied to you all the same, as you should have at least received some sort of reply by now.

I think their (pesimistic) policy is 24-hours (not 48), at least that’s what the confirmation e-mail says:

[quote]This email is to let you know that we have received your message and
will be replying to it within 24 hours. Your tracking # is 1937842.[/quote]
As for annoying them, I was polite at all times. I even told them (when they were still replying) that it wasn’t really time-sensitive, since the account wasn’t yet in use, thinking that I could wait a few hours… maybe that was a mistake on my part and should’ve put the people are dying choice in the selection-box even when that wasn’t true.

I was very specific with what was happening, the tests I made, I even told them that they can use the address and send emails (I told them how to pause a fetchmail I have running) in order to test… and I told them that if they thought it’d be better, I can erase and re-create the account… when I bugged them after waiting for quite a few hours, I even told them that I’d be somehow happy with a “we’re working on it, please be patient” to no avail… there’s no way for me to know even if someone’s working on it or if maybe my messages to support fell in the same (or another) blackhole that the one eating mails for my poor address. See an image of the support history

Should I wait 'till the 48 hours are past? And then, if I don’t get an answer, what do I do?

I’m not threatening nor trolling with the classic “I’ll get my business outta here and tell everyone in the net that DH sux” since I think that’s a silly thing to do and I actually don’t intend to do so. I’m even recommending DH to friends of mine, I like it, I like being on debian, I like being able to ssh to my account and configure things manually, I even like the way they handle support most of the time, and the way they handle the status page… in fact, whenever there’s a problem posted there that affects me and keep an eye on it, I hate the trolling 'round there (but love it is not censored), and always think, “hey, if you have a specific problem, submit a ticket”…

But it’s the second time I have an issue with support not answering, not even saying “we’ve got a problem with this and it’ll take us a few more hours to solve it, please be patient”… last time it finally was solved in less than a day ('bout 18 hours). But again, I think that not giving the tinyest hint that someone is dedicating a few cpu cycles to your problem or will do in a foreseeable future is a bad policy.

As I didn’t get the smallest answer in almost 2 days, the only place I though I could ask was here…

Their normal turn-around time is 24-hours, but the staff have said before that they’ve almost never had a ticket open longer than 48-hours.

My guess here, and maybe I’m going out on a limb with this, is that the reason they aren’t answering your ticket is due to this status blog post. Again, maybe I’m going out on a limb, but they’re saying that if you’re ticket isn’t being answered then you should cancel it as the issue is resolved.
Now obviously that’s not the case for you, so I’d do this: Kill your current tickets (via the method they suggest in that blog post) and file a new one, under “OMG PEOPLE ARE DYING” and explain, in your new ticket, that you’ve read that blog post (I’d be best to specify this fact anyways) and that you’re still having problems with the mail account you’ve created. I would bet they’d get back to you a lot faster in this regard

[quote]My guess here, and maybe I’m going out on a limb with this, is that the reason they aren’t answering your ticket is due to this status blog post. Again, maybe I’m going out on a limb, but they’re saying that if you’re ticket isn’t being answered then you should cancel it as the issue is resolved.
Now obviously that’s not the case for you, so I’d do this: Kill your current tickets (via the method they suggest in that blog post) and file a new one, under “OMG PEOPLE ARE DYING” and explain, in your new ticket, that you’ve read that blog post (I’d be best to specify this fact anyways) and that you’re still having problems with the mail account you’ve created. I would bet they’d get back to you a lot faster in this regard [/quote]
Thanx, Mousee… but it wasn’t that status blog post, since it got resolved before I posted my first ticket, which was actually answered… it was some time after that that I lost all signs of life from support…

Have you tried creating another email address? If that one fails as well, you have a good reason for submitting another ticket and have provided support with some additional information about how the situation hasn’t changed or is repeatable.

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I tried most everything… and apparently, the problem turned out to be that the shell account that I’m using to hold the mail address is not recognized by the mail server…

That is, you usually have 2 servers (3 if you count mysql). The one you log to via ssh or ftp, which acts as your web server and in which your ‘user’ account is created, and a mail server, in which an account is created for every account in the related web servers. Both mount the same home directory (actually from an external filer) albeit, in different mountpoints.

I discovered this after receiving a bounce for a message I delivered from a gmail account 2 days ago (apparently, after 48 hours, the mail server gave up and bounced), where the message clearly stated “user xxxx doesn’t exist (expanded from zzz@yyy.com)”. That is, it received the mail for the address zzz@yyy.com that was associated to user xxxx in my server, but the mail server doesn’t know the account (probably, some hiccup when the shell account was created made that it didn’t make thru the /etc/passwd -or whatever it uses- in the mail server).

Anyway… I created a new ticket (associated to the shell account and NOT to the mail address) stating all this and I’m waiting to see if they can fix it… I only hope I don’t have 2 wait another 48 hours.

BTW, I still didn’t hear from support, and the last communication from them has indeed turned more than 48 hours (almost 49 by now).

I do think something is really wrong with support… possibly in the system, since I don’t belive that a pissed off support guy is really able (or willing) to not answer a request for this long…

Hmmm. I wonder if it’s the classic “support handoff” problem at this point? You know, the classic tradeoff between consistent handling by an assigned individual vs. less laggy multi-shift handling by multiple individuals all tracking a single support thread in the CRM software?

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